Monday, August 18, 2003

Killer elevators

A doctor was killed today at Christus St. Joseph Hospital when an elevator malfunctioned, decapitating him, authorities said.

Hitoshi Nikaidoh, 35, of Dallas, a surgical resident at the hospital at 1919 La Branch, was stepping onto a second-floor elevator in the main building around 9:30 a.m. when the doors closed, pinning his shoulders, said Harold Jordan, an investigator with the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office. The elevator car then moved upward, severing the doctor's head, Jordan said.

This is a horrible tragedy, of course, but what strikes me as really strange about it is that it was the plot of an obscure Dutch horror movie called The Lift. From the IMDB plot summary:

A lift begins displaying some erratic behavior, like trapping some party goers and nearly suffocating them, and decapitating a security guard. Felix, the technician from the lift company, can't find anything wrong with the circuitry. When he and a nosy reporter begin asking questions of the lift company's electronics partner (Rising Sun Electronics) his boss puts him on a leave of absence. A subsequent visit to a professor leads them to believe that some evil experiments are being conducted with MICROCHIPS.

I thought of this because, believe it or not, I have seen this movie. I went to see it in the theater years ago, not fully realizing that I was going to a horror movie about a killer elevator, with subtitles.